Space, Sci-fi and Centauri Rising

28th of November, 2020 by Chris Correia

Hi there!

I’m Chris, the project lead of Centauri Rising. That’s just a fancy title though because we are a super small team. This is an introductory post to who we are, what this game is, and what you can expect from following our development. I’d like to start by telling you why we’re making this game and it all starts about a million years ago with Project-X by Team17.

This was my very first exposure to space in the sense that I played this when I was about 6 years old in 1992 on my brother's Amiga and I had never seen any movie or TV show set in space before, all I knew about space was that that’s where the stars and the moon are. I think it changed me forever.

Since then I’ve been a huge sci-fi nerd and religiously played, watched and read almost all the great classics as well as more obscure stuff just like many of you. I’m happy to nerd out with you over on our discord so come say hi!

As many other enterprising young men, I wanted to create video games. A dream so large it had to wait over 15 years to be tackled. A dream so powerful that after successfully failing for years to convince anybody to help me make this game, I just had to sit down and learn game development from scratch on my own.

In 2006, I discovered a little known tactical space game called Nexus:The Jupiter Incident and this idea of a game that lets you intimately control a single starship instead of a large fleet simply got stuck in my head and wasn’t gonna let go. “But Chris, it’s 2020...” you observe astutely. Yeah.. It’s a long story that I might go into detail some other time but the point is; I’m doing it, we’re doing it. Better nate than lever!

Fábio Reis, our crazy-eyed skateboarding mathematician father of 4, who has worked as a lead developer for a major game studio for the last 5 years and is about to embark in an epic journey to another AAA developer. He's a pretty busy guy but he's responsible for the heavy technical systems in Centauri Rising, big brain stuff. The latest system he's been tackling is a physics based thruster system using a PID controller as base so that the spaceships in the game feel and look reactive and THICC.

Artur Sousa has literally quit his soul crushing day job to pursue his dream of working as a composer and sound person. Besides being a freelancer and musician, he's responsible for creating epic sound waves of all kinds for Centauri Rising.

Both these guys are my childhood friends that I've suckered into working _for with me. I'm incredibly lucky to have their help. As for me, I own a videogame trailer production company and have a background in VFX, project management and copywriting.

Centauri Rising is a different kind of space game, inspired by the likes of Homeworld and the above mentioned N:TJI, we want to craft an experience that makes space cool. A mature (not THAT kind of mature) experience that combines polished tactical gameplay, striking unique visuals and music, and an interesting plot into a cinematic single player package that’s going to stick with you for years. For this we’ll use fully voiced characters, tense tactical gameplay, cinematic cutscenes and we’ll treat the sci-fi genre with respect. Other influences are the fantastic FTL , the movie Interstellar and my all time favourite sci-fi show, Star Trek: TNG.

The vision for this game has been stuck in my head for ages and there's a certain feeling that I think has been missing from most games set in space. The Homeworld series captured something mythical about being in space. This feeling of an epic journey is what Centauri Rising is being made for. Most games in space are also about building and commanding fleets, or have the player alone in the cockpit. In Centauri Rising the player ship is like an avatar, an extension of the player. It's the only ship the player controls throughout the game, and this makes it special. The crew, systems and mechanics associated with that will make for an intimate experience, but a tactical one instead of strategic, and definitely not arcadey. Anyway we're doing our best to make it fracking cool.

We all have full time jobs, so development will inherently be slow, but we are taking this project seriously and the current main goal is to complete a vertical slice. If you don’t know what that means, it’s a term used to describe a prototype of a game that aims to have all major features in place, as well as a good amount of art and assets that can give someone an idea of what the entire experience will be like when the game is complete. That doesn’t mean it’s close to being complete. The vertical slice then needs to be expanded into a full game by adding a lot of content like the art, 3D models, music, levels and missions, voice acting, cut scenes, etc. etc. So going forward we’ll have blog posts, videos and conversations about the progress on the game, as well as our thoughts on crafting a unique space experience from both a design, narrative and technical perspective. Currently we're in a pre-prototype stage.

The objective is to use the vertical slice to get additional funding to allow us to work on the game full time and drive the project to completion. If you’re reading this you can be part of this journey and even help us out by following the game’s twitter or signing up to our newsletter below.

That’s it for now. Thank you for reading and hope to see you in our discord!